Luke Messac

The Average Cost of a Family Health Insurance Plan Is Now $27,000 Higher spending on chronic diseases, weight-loss drugs and hospital bills helped drive the increase.

Health care rentiers are eating your raises. We’ve got solutions: single payer, public production of pharmaceuticals, enforce laws against corporate practice of medicine. Time to stop pretending this is hopelessly complicated.

www.wsj.com/health/healt...

You don’t realize just how bad the shortage of primary care doctors has become until you move and look for a new one. Yes, we are accepting new patients, I heard with relief today. But, the receptionist continued, the first appointment available is August 2027.

U.S. Pauses Visitor Visas for Gazans After Right-Wing Outcry

The evil is boundless
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/16/u...

YouTube video by Breaking Points US Labor Leader Kidnapped, Beaten By IDF: IGNORED By US Diplomats

This is courage.

youtu.be/X7hRVAH3gQA

YouTube video by Click On Detroit | Local 4 | WDIV Full 1-on-1 interview with Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed

if you need hope from someone who actually deserves to inspire it, check out @abdulelsayed.bsky.social, a doctor who lives up to what medicine should be about: an insistence that all lives are worthy. Oh, and he’s running to be a U.S. Senator from Michigan.

youtu.be/xhS6_Xoz09g

1/n
Presidents of 5 Universities in Israel call on Israeli government to take action against famine in Gaza, mention the holocaust as an obligation to prevent indiscriminate harm to innocents, use the term 'crimes against humanity'.
Lt - original letter in Hebrew
Rt - my translation to English

Rhode Island Enacts Two Laws Regulating Medical Debt - insideARM On June 26, the governor of Rhode Island signed into law S0169, which amends the state’s deceptive trade practices laws to prohibit credit reporting agencies from reporting a consumer’s medical debt. ...

Rhode Island passed solid legislation this year on medical debt. Previously one of nation's worst ion medical debt protections. Now the state outlaws wage garnishment for medical debt, capped interest rates on repayment, and banned credit reporting.

www.insidearm.com/news/0009373...

Anyone who votes for this reconciliation can never claim to care about medical debt. States that expanded Medicaid after the ACA saw a 50 percent decrease in medical debt. By kicking over 10 million off Medicaid, this bill will reverse many of those gains.

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

A Doctor on What He Saw in Gaza From the daily newsletter: a report detailing the wreckage he witnessed.

At a conference in Oslo last week, a medical student from Gaza showed photos of the textbooks she had to burn to cook amid bombardment. For more on medicine in Gaza, read emergency physician Clayton Dalton in the New Yorker. The ending is gut-wrenching:
www.newyorker.com/newsletter/t...

Emergency physician protests healthcare cuts by sitting on State House steps for 25 hours An emergency physician is making a silent stand for federal cuts to healthcare by sitting on the State House steps for 25 straight hours.From the front lines to

One of my most inspiring teachers during residency is in the midst of a 25 hour long protest against Medicaid cuts. When I went to visit him at midnight he was surrounded by ED colleagues coming off of shifts. These are people worth following.

turnto10.com/news/local/e...

The end of bipartisan support for global AIDS treatment: 20 years of progress is on the line The longer PEPFAR remains hobbled, the greater the number of patients who will suffer the terrifying consequences of stopped treatment—a kind of reverse Lazarus effect.

The destruction of USAID is the betrayal of a devotion to dignity that crossed party lines. I wrote about the human and spiritual toll in America Magazine:

www.americamagazine.org/politics-soc...

Medicine and Lucre | Los Angeles Review of Books While looking at three recent books, physician Luke Messac explains why the public has legitimate reasons to distrust our healthcare system.

For the @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social, I wrote about three recent books by @victorroy.bsky.social, Colleen Grogan, and Gardiner Harris and the conquest of medicine by financial logics.

lareviewofbooks.org/article/medi...

This is awesome. Was he really like this?

lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

Tuberculosis Resurgent as Trump Funding Cut Disrupts Treatment Globally The United States was the major funder of tuberculosis programs. Now hundreds of thousands of sick patients can’t find tests or drugs, and risk spreading the disease.

No one in a major newspaper is documenting the mass murder that Trump is committing better than @stephanienolen.bsky.social. This could be reversed in a moment.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/h...

American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and … From award-winning, New York Times bestselling historia…

I’d been waiting to read this Hochschild book, maybe because it seemed even more dismal than his others (loved them all), but it is time.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/60...

‘His way has to be the model’: Team Trump turns to Hungarian strongman for inspiration on higher ed - The Boston Globe For American conservatives, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary is willing to do what it takes to reclaim universities from the left.

This is the best explanation I’ve heard of what is happening in higher ed, and what is to come (also, the Boston Globe’s reporting and analysis are just awesome right now):

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/03/07/m...

Excerpt from the linked story

Remember when the WH insisted that global HIV prevention & treatment was exempt from the freeze? When it seemed MAYBE they understood that cutting off medicine could put the entire planet at risk of drug resistant HIV strains?

Wrong. Elon Musk’s interns were simply shutting payments off manually.

Oh, so sorry to hear this. Everyone read antipolitics machine, so essential, but give a man a fish and global shadows were such revelations for me. Rest in peace.

Emergency Food, TB Tests and H.I.V. Drugs: Vital Health Aid Remains Frozen Despite Court Ruling The Trump administration appears to be flouting a judge’s order pausing the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D.

Absolute comic book villainy here. Bono used to talk about “ending stupid deaths.” This administration is just hell-bent on maximizing them.

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/20/h...

Mass Training Call: Building on 50501 Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

Listening in on this mass organizing call -- Cori Bush currently on the line

buildtheresistance.org/BuildingOn50...

Trevor Noah’s podcast is really good

There is literally HIV being transmitted from mom to baby because of the illegal shutdown of US AID and now Trump’s State Department wants to spend 400 million dollars on Tesla cyber trucks. This is not about efficiency. It’s a smash and grab.

On Writing Down Our Dreams During a Living Nightmare When it's time to rebuild from the wreckage of the Trump-Musk rampage, the left may have the opportunity to implement a truly transformative agenda. However, unless we have relatively detailed…

Today, @lookheron.bsky.social argues that, if we are lucky, a left-liberal coalition may soon have the chance to build new and better institutions out of the wreckage.

However, unless policy scholars work on developing relatively detailed proposals now, we will squander this opportunity.

In Stellenbosch a decade ago, my wife and I stayed in a B&B on a street of gated homes with private security. A few miles away were huge shantytowns; the cooks and cleaners boarded buses there each morning. The owner complained he was “too male, too pale” to make it in South Africa.

Follow them at @publiccitizen.bsky.social

About Public Citizen Litigation Group - Public Citizen Public Citizen Litigation Group, founded in 1972, is the litigating arm of Public Citizen. A public interest law firm litigating…

Those talented lawyers who chose public interest over corporate law are having their moment. One of the orgs filing successful lawsuits against Trump’s illegal actions is the Public Citizen Litigation Group, an arm of the group founded by Ralph Nader in the 70s.

www.citizen.org/about/staff/...

Democracy Forward - We go to court for democracy Democracy depends on a government that works for all people. We fight vigorously in court against abuses of power and attempts to undermine a government that works for people who need it most.

Seems like an effective thing to do now, if you’ve got the means, is to donate to groups filing lawsuits to defend us from Trump’s illegal actions. Groups like Democracy Forward, who halted (for now) the federal spending freeze and mass firings.

democracyforward.org

CFPB Activity Ordered to Stop Under New Director - insideARM If you missed it, news broke on Saturday that Rohit Chopra is no longer at the helm of the CFPB. Scott Bessent was named as acting director yesterday morning. Politico, reported that by noon yesterday...

Today’s top story on the debt collector listserv I follow. The stop work order at CFPB (which published incredible reports on medical debt and took action to limit its harms) is a joy to the industry, though the industry worries state regulators will fill the void

www.insidearm.com/news/0009277...

How North Carolina Made Its Hospitals Do Something About Medical Debt - KFF Health News State officials threatened to withhold public money from hospitals, pioneering a strategy that could become a national model.

This is so good. How North Carolina’s plan to fight medical debt became reality, in the face of hospital lobby opposition.

kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

Trump Administration Halts H.I.V. Drug Distribution in Poor Countries PEPFAR’s computer systems also are being taken offline, a sign that the program may not return, as Republican critics had hoped.

This is just straight up mass murder.

www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/h...